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As Hamas builds an army in Gaza — contradicting the diplomatic consensus that a new Palestinian state should have a police force but no army — the temptation for Israel to invade Gaza will be severe. But the damage of such an attack to Mr. Abbas, who may be seen as riding an Israeli tank back to power in Gaza, could be fatal — threatening not just his negotiating authority, but his life.
Secondly, settlements. Forget for a moment the enormous task of pulling out the 65,000 Israelis who live beyond the separation barrier in the West Bank, or a significant number of the 209,000 who live in occupied territory inside the barrier, or the 190,000 more who live in East Jerusalem.
The road map calls for a freeze on all settlement activity, including natural growth, and the removal of some 24 outposts set up illegally after March 2001. Mr. Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have been negotiating with the settlers to remove the outposts in return for legalizing others; they also want to move some settlers to the big “settlement blocs” that Israel intends to keep. Even Palestinian negotiators, according to senior American officials, privately admit Israel will keep some of those settlement blocs.
But the Palestinians define a settlement freeze strictly. According to papers prepared by the Palestinian negotiating team, the Palestinians say the road map forbids moving people from one settlement to another before any final status agreement. They also say a freeze means a halt to all new construction, including expanding existing buildings or building new bypass roads for settlers, and a halt to all forms of Israeli assistance to the settlers, including financial incentives, land allocations, building permits and the like — even in the settlement blocs Israel intends to keep.
Israeli officials say that, for Annapolis, Mr. Olmert is prepared to announce a general freeze on settlement construction. But how detailed will it be? And how much will he dare politically while he is trying to negotiate the larger agreement?
Two years ago, the Israeli government, as Ms. Rice will remember, was also prepared, in order to please her, to sign her agreement on Gaza movement and access, including allowing “safe passage” for bus convoys between Gaza and the West Bank. Even before Hamas won elections and then took over Gaza, Palestinian rocket fire and Israeli defense concerns killed that agreement, despite previous American efforts to reform Palestinian security forces. And Israeli officials made it clear that they had never intended to start the bus convoys, which they considered an unwarranted risk, in any case.
